Raspbian

Raspbian is a project to create a hard float port of Debian for the Raspberry Pi and similar devices which use ARMv6 processors with VFPv2. The official Debian armhf packages are built with ARMv7, VFPv3_D16 and Thumb2. So they are not suitable for the Raspberry Pi and similar devices. To get round this we have to change the compiler defaults (easy) and recompile everything (harder than it sounds).

Infrastructure has been set-up for building packages. We aim to stay as close to Debian 7 (Wheezy) as possible, but we will pull in packages from sid and/or make our own modifications when we deem it necessary.

A chroot can be bootstrapped from a Debian 6.0 (Squeeze) armel installation using the following commands (replace /chroots/wheezy-armhf-rpi with where you want your chroot).

If you just want to install the minimum number of packages add a --variant=minbase to the bootstrap command

Since this is running in a chroot you probably don't want it attempting to start and stop services when you update packages. To avoid this create a file /usr/sbin/policy-rc.d
with the following commands.

local change likely to be kept until debian makes 4.7 the default on armhf.

perl

change build-depends and debian/config.debian to build with gcc-4.7

gcc 4.6 failed to build package with ICE

local change likely to be kept until debian makes 4.7 the default on armhf

apply hack to change default compiler for perl modules back to plain cc

Just because we built perl with 4.7 doesn't mean we want the same to apply to perl modules (it had proved a massive PITA because there was nothing to pull it in)

local change likely to be kept until debian makes 4.7 the default on armhf

pspp

add build-depends on gcc-4.7

package was trying to build perl related code with 4.7 (likely because we built perl with it)

now dealt with on the perl side, will probablly be dropped with next update to package

disable testsuite

testsuite failed and we don't have the resources to troubleshoot it

local hack which hopefully can be dropped later

pyopenssl

seperate build-arch and build-indep

documentation build was silently failing (causing a file not found error later) on raspbian

Bug 675414submitted to debian for build-arch/build-indep split and has been fixed in experimental. No idea on root cause of documentation build issue.

qpid-cpp

add build-depends on gcc-4.7

package was trying to build perl related code with 4.7 (likely because we built perl with it)

now dealt with on the perl side, will probablly be dropped with next update to package

qt4-x11

Disable neon

armv6 doesn't have neon (and not all armv7 systems do either)

Debian armhf isn't supposed to require NEON either. Working out whether this should be pushed upstream would require working out if there is any runtime checking for neon in QT which I (plugwash) don't have time for ATM.

Building documentation on raspbian seems to hang, when updating package a source+all upload should be built on amd64 or similar. The buildds can then fill in the remaining binaries.

rrdtool

add build-depends on gcc-4.7

package was trying to build perl related stuff with gcc-4.7 (likely because we built perl with it)

local change likely to be kept until debian makes gcc-4.7 the default on armhf.

squeak-vm

revert change to use system libraries

jpeg loading was broken

bug should probablly be filed in debian but afaict noone has got arround to it yet.

subversion

newer version from sid

plugwash thought package was about to migrate to wheezy but it didn't actually migrate

not much we can do about this :(

tcsh

testsuite disabled

testsuite failed and we needed to get update built to keep source and binary in sync

local hack, hopefully we can drop later.

ttf-opensymbol

new source package to build dummy package as libreoffice version used in raspbian no longer builds it

libreoffice in raspbian was updated to experimental version due to build issues (see above)

will be permanent in raspbian wheezy, hopefully can be dropped for jessie

twinkle

retintroduce package and change build-depends to libccrtp1 and libzrtcpp1

User requested package and current versions of libccrtp and libzrtpcpp are not compatible with twinkle.

local change for raspbian wheezy. For jessie I plan to clean up packages that are no longer in debian and tell users to install them from wheezy.

valgrind

various fixes to make package build/work for armv6

valgrind was broken

hopefully upstream will deal with this sooner or later but we may have to carry it locally for a while

virtuoso-opensource

revert removal of mono stuff from armhf

unlike debian armhf we plan to ship mono in raspbian

will be raspbian specific change for wheezy, hopefully for jessie debian will get a mono version that works on armhf too.

webkit

disable JIT

JIT doesn't seem to work on sub-armv7

should probablly be dealt with in debian too but someone else can fight that battle